Shut up.
Dean Orman had Deanna Ward killed.
No.
Williams tried to stop them.
Quit this, Brian. Stop.
Williams couldn’t stop him, but-
But?
But Williams will not tell the police. He only invents a puzzle for-
For?
For us. To terrorize us. Like Polly at the kilns that night, but-
But he didn’t mention Polly.
He didn’t mention Polly, did he?
In the car he hadn’t mentioned the girl Brian had met. He’d explained everything, the fake wife and Dean Orman and Pig Stephens, but he hadn’t mentioned Polly.
Was that his daughter? Had Williams’s own daughter been in on the game?
No. Impossible. She would have to be in her forties. The girl at the kilns was much younger.
And so what did that mean?
It meant that there were still hidden truths. It meant that the deception was still ongoing. Williams told them he had explained it all, but he hadn’t. There were still pieces to the puzzle that needed to be added.
And if the puzzle is unsolved, then that means-
What?
That means he’s still lying.
And if he was lying, then the story about Dean Orman was false. It was just another ruse. A hoax. It meant that Williams was trying to implicate Orman. For what? For some long-standing grudge? Professional jealousy. It meant-
What? Say it.
It meant that Williams had killed Deanna Ward.
It was the only logical solution. The thought plagued Brian, scratched at him like a sort of mad itch. At some point-perhaps as he passed the Bell City exit-the thoughts became geometric. Physical. They dashed and prodded their way inside his skull. They had edges that scraped at him sharply.
Leonard Williams killed Deanna Ward.
I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us do, Mary had said to him.
And it made perfect sense. Williams killed Deanna, and his guilt continually drove him to the brink of madness. To assuage his guilt he tried to implicate a man who had always been his better, a man who had overstepped him in the academy, who had a legendary friendship with a famous scientist named Stanley Milgram: Ed Orman.
Slowly, pitifully, the crime had driven Leonard Williams crazy. He orchestrated a scenario where he set the lies in place. A system of intricate mistruths. A false book that made it look like his interest was merely professional. The adopted daughter, Polly. Williams as a hero. Williams as a savior. Yet-
Yet? His conscience egged him on.
It was much easier to link Williams to Deanna Ward than it was Ed Orman.
After all, it was Williams, not Orman, who had lived close to Cale and Deanna Ward in Bell City. It was Williams, not Orman, who had the unhealthy interest in the case, who devised the Polly story with its horrifying details. It was Williams, not Orman, who loved those gruesome and violent tangrams Dennis had told Brian and Mary about.
He wanted to see Williams punished for what he’d done to him. Williams was a potential murderer, and he had entrapped his students in his twisted game because-
Because why? Because the man was fucking sick. It was clear to Brian now. He had finally seen through the lies Williams had told them as they drove back from Bell City this morning. It was all just a smokescreen.
Suddenly he felt an uncontrollable hatred for Williams.
The viaduct. The Thing buried there.
Can you do it? he asked himself.
Could he?
What choice do you have when your world has been turned upside down by a cruel game? What do you do, Brian wondered, when all the clues and signs point to one solution? What do you do when place, time, motive, and circumstance point to one man?
You turn around. You go back to finish it.
Which is exactly what Brian House did.
49
“Hello?” Mary called after the man in the Red Sox cap.
Silence. Inside Seminary there was a high, fixed silence. Nothing moved.
She climbed the flight of stairs to the second floor and went in. Down the hall, a light was burning in Williams’s classroom. She walked down the hall toward that light. What if Orman is in there? she thought. What if I’m being drawn into a trap?
But she couldn’t stop now. The game was ending, and she had to complete it or else she could not forgive herself for coming so close to finding the answers and failing. She had to find out how it ended. Deanna Ward was still missing, and someone in that room knew where she was. Stopping now would sacrifice everything she had learned in these six weeks.
Mary walked through the door.
50
Brian arrived on campus a little after nightfall. The dorms were dark and still. No cars crept down Montgomery, and even the streetlights seemed to be darker, throwing off a misty and incomplete gray rather than the blinding orange they normally did.
They say you become obsessive after tragedies befall you. He wondered if that was it-if his ability to quell his own impulses had been shattered after Marcus’s suicide. That would explain a lot-the nagging obedience he felt to Williams’s game, the paranoia after meeting the girl at the kilns. His craving tonight for some kind of closure.
Brian dialed Mary’s cell phone but got no answer. He drove to Brown, parked on the curb, and left his truck running. This dorm, like all the others, was empty. He had to try, though. He had to warn Mary about Williams before she contacted him.
He took the elevator up to her floor, and when he stepped into the hall he saw the hunched figure of a girl. She was sitting on the floor, her back to Mary’s door.
“Polly?” he asked.
The girl looked up at him. Her eyes were weary and red. She’d been crying.
“Who?” she asked.
It was Summer McCoy, Mary’s friend.
“I was waiting on Mary,” the girl said.
“I’ve been trying to call her,” Brian replied.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Brian. I’m a…a friend of Mary’s.”